


Suptober Day 21: Fear

by tiamatv



Series: Promptober 2020 [20]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Angst, Canon Compliant, Canon Temporary Character Death, Dean Winchester is Bad at Self-Care, Depression, M/M, Season 13 Castiel and Dean Winchester Reunion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-22
Updated: 2020-10-22
Packaged: 2021-03-09 07:14:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27139912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tiamatv/pseuds/tiamatv
Summary: “How come you weren’t afraid of the monster?” the little girl asks Dean. And, like she should, she sounds suspicious about it. “You’re not scared of something that could kill you?”Dean smiles, a little sadly. “Nah.”
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Series: Promptober 2020 [20]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1954990
Comments: 21
Kudos: 126





	Suptober Day 21: Fear

**Author's Note:**

> Everything here is canon-compliantish for early season 13, but we all know Supernatural has gone some pretty dark places. So if you need trigger warnings, they are in the endnotes.

It’s a little girl who asks him. It’s always a girl, weirdly enough: boys kind of want to be like him, which Dean thinks is alternately cool and sort of fucked-up, but the girls never do, and they’re always the ones who ask the uncomfortable questions. This one is little and blonde; there’s still blood in her hair, but she got all of it off her skin. Dean gently lays strips of butterfly bandages across the clean, shallow cut running down her arm.

(Her parents didn’t want to go back to the hospital to get themselves and their kids checked out and patched up by a pro. Considering that the ghost that almost got them really, _really_ liked scalpels and needles, Dean can’t even blame them for that.)

“How come you weren’t afraid of the monster?” she asks him. And, like she should, she sounds suspicious about it. “My brother says it’s because you’re a guy.”

Dean chokes on a chuckle before he straightens out his face properly. “You can’t believe big brothers when they say shi—” crap, he doesn’t actually know how old she is; he _thinks_ she’s younger than Krissy was when he first met her, but kids look younger to him every damned year. “—stuff that doesn’t make sense,” he finishes, seriously. He nods in Sam’s direction. Sam’s got custody of patching up the family mom. Yeah, they couldn’t pay Dean enough to do _that,_ he’ll take the kids any day. “I used to tell _him_ cookies grew on cookie trees to see how many people he’d tell that to in school.”

The kid thinks about that, watching his hands as he wraps up her arm in a gauze roll, just to keep the butterfly tape covered up for a few days. Her hands are steady as he directs her to hold the end pinched between her fingers. Frankly, he’s impressed. He thinks her name is Kerry. Carrie? Cari? Who knows with people, nowadays. Her parents are pretty damned frou-frou. They have table runners on the tables and doilies on the mantlepiece.

Good kid, though.

“You could have told him _lots_ worse than that,” she decides, finally.

Dean flashes her a grin. “Well, yeah. That’s why I’m a _good_ big brother.”

She snorts. (Okay, either she’s older than he thinks she is, or they’re learning how to be sarcastic earlier and earlier nowadays.) “Seriously, though. How come you weren’t scared? You just…” and she waves her free hand at the little pile of Winchester goodness looking so completely out of place in this suburbia living room—two shotguns, a crowbar. A mostly empty box of Morton’s. Dean’s lighter is back in his pocket; he gave it to her to hold when he was cleaning out her wound, but she gave it right back. “You just did… stuff.”

Dean sits back on his heels and tucks the last little bit of gauze that she had between her fingers neatly into the end of the wrap, holding it closed. She pulls her hand towards him and looks at the patch-up job he did of her wrist. He guesses she finds it acceptable, ‘cause she nods like a proper little princess.

“Yeah, I do stuff. It’s got nothing to do with being a guy,” Dean says, wryly. “So your brother’s full of crap. Girls are plenty brave. Hell, sometimes they’re really _scary._ ”

Like Mom. Like Rowena. Billie. Fucking _Amara._ Not that he’s telling a kid that he knows witches, or reapers, or God’s big sister, or any of that.

Though this kid might get a kick out of it. She was the one who threw her brother’s Doritos at the ghost before he and Sam burst in the door. Turns out there’s enough salt in them to make a ghost at least _pause._

Kerri rolls her eyes like she’s heard it all before, and no-one has ever once meant it. “Uh-huh,” she sneers.

It gets the first real smile out of him that Dean thinks he’s shed since he watched his best friend and the love of his entire goddamned life burn.

(Cas didn’t even have a hunter wake. Just a bonfire, wrapped in rayon curtains he would’ve hated being burned in ‘cause they’re ‘environmentally unsound, and ugly besides.’ The only ones standing vigil were the two dumb assholes who called him down and brought him to this, and the little monster who got him killed.)

But a little blond girl in jelly slippers and a Little Ponies of the Apocalypse shirt (what the hell, kids get weirder every day) doesn’t need to hear anything about that, either. She doesn’t need that any more than she needed the ghost of Stabby McStabberson (Martin DeBakey, actually, the asshole failure descendant of some famous cardiac surgeon, pissed off that the kid’s dad bought his granddad’s instruments for some collection) fucking up her evening.

“I mean it,” Dean says, and he does. “Girls do scary things when they think they _should._ ‘Cause it’s scary but it’s the right thing.” Because no-one looks at them and says ‘you have to be a real man, son.’ “Boys do stupid crazy stuff sometimes ‘cause they think it makes them look cool or ‘cause they don’t have the sense to make themselves stop. That’s not brave, it’s dumb.”

She considers, running a finger up and down the gauze. “You don’t look dumb,” she muses.

This time, Dean laughs out loud. It feels kind of good. He forgot that it could feel good. “Well, I ain’t the smart brother,” he chuckles. “And I’ve done plenty of dumb. But that’s not it.” He pushes himself slowly back to his feet and stretches out his back. “I’m just used to this. This is… this is what I do. It’s my everyday. You know? So when you do something over and over, it’s not scary anymore.”

She gives him a condescending look down her nose, even from nearly a foot down. The blue eyes almost wreck him, but they’re just a shade lighter, just a shade clearer, and framed with thin, dark gold lashes, not a thick brush of brown; they don’t have the right sadness in them, that little quirk of an old, old humor.

“You’re not scared of something that could _kill_ you?” she asks.

Dean smiles, a little sadly. “Nah.”

He thinks about that—about Kerri or Carrie or Ceridwen or whatever, giving him a look like she’s decided that he really _is_ dumb—as he and Sam are driving to Grand Junction, Colorado. They’ve fought demons and angels; they’ve patched together the Apocalypse. They’ve been to Hell and back—literally—and they’ve been to Heaven and back—literally—and both places have their own bullshit.

Dean Winchester _isn’t_ afraid of the shit that normal people are afraid of. He probably never was. He wasn’t just making crap up when he told her that when this shit becomes ordinary, it stops becoming something that causes _fear._ When he was a kid, and vampires came after him in his dreams, it was looking for a machete that he dreamed about, not running and hiding.

That’s just a fact. Hell, Dean was probably more scared of the idea of John Winchester actually showing up to a goddamned parent teacher conference or something.

Dying?

Well.

Dean’s not afraid of _himself_ dying, not anymore. Maybe once upon a time. But, shit, there’s so much worse than that out there. And it really, really says something just how fucked up Dean’s whole existence is that when Cas told him, “And when you finally turn—and you will turn—Sam, and everyone you know, everyone you love… they could be long dead. Everyone except me?”

Even with the Mark of Cain screaming at him from his arm, even with the blood burning so hot in his ears he thought his eyes were gonna bleed, that was a bizarre fucking _comfort_. ‘Cause Dean knew, he _knew_ that no matter what, Cas wasn’t gonna give up on him. Cas was never gonna leave him alone. Cas was never gonna let him go.

Until Cas did. Until Cas _went_.

Yeah, Dean’s not scared of dying.

“Me and my brother… we’re the guys that stop the monsters,” he tells a kid that he couldn’t save. “We’re the guys that scare _them_.”

Sam can see Dean slipping away, further and further into fearlessness, or maybe it’s recklessness, ‘cause Dean wasn’t kidding when he told Kerri that boys do shit ‘cause they don’t have the sense to make themselves stop. Dean feels bad for Sam, but with the walls of this dark, dark place all around him and the inside of his heart so empty, all he can give his little brother, the one he’s always tried to protect, is lies. Or at least they’re lies now.

Dean sort of hopes they won’t be that way forever, ‘cause he doesn’t want to leave Sammy alone the way Dean feels so fucking alone right now. He might not believe in much anymore, but he believes in that. He doesn’t believe in _them_ anymore, but at least he believes in Sam.

When he tells Sam that he fought his way out of this before, Dean knows it’s true; when he tells him, “I will fight my way back again,” though, he doesn’t know.

When he holds out the syringe to Sam that he knows will kill him, Dean doesn’t know. When he plunges it into himself and presses a syringe that might as well be a trigger, he doesn’t know.

But Billie’s not scared of him, either, and _she_ knows.

“Maybe you’re not that guy anymore,” she tells him. Dean doesn’t know if the way she’s mocking him when she cocks her head at him is intentional, or just cruel the way their lives are, sometimes. “And you tell people you’ll work through it, but you know you won’t—you can’t, and that scares the hell out of you.”

Well, so it turns out that Billie is Death now, Billie’s still a smart cookie, and she’s still fucking terrifying. At least old Death, Dean could bribe with taquitos.

“Well, I guess I made my choice,” Dean tells her, and guess what? He’s _not_ afraid.

Yeah, Dean didn’t actually think he’d get over Cas dying. He’s not even really sure he hoped he would.

But Billie won’t take him either.

And when he hears a familiar harsh, rasping voice, distorted by the cellphone, saying in a full-on grouchy-angel bitch tone, “It is very difficult to find a phone box, now, can you come? I only found one quarter and a nickel, and the box doesn’t take pennies,” Dean Winchester prays from his heart for the first time in a long, long time.

 _Thank you, Billie_ , he says. _Thanks for not having me. For this single goddamned instant, if this is all I get, if all I can do is believe that the world is this good for just one more fucking miserable second of my life, thank you_. _Amen_.

He doesn’t pray to Cas. ‘Cause he doesn’t know what he’ll do if Cas doesn’t hear him. Hell, he’s not fucking sure what he’ll do if Cas _does._

It’s so bizarre that actually _looking_ at a figure with bad fashion sense and slouchy shoulders lit up under a soft blue ‘TELEPHONE’ sign (Cas is right, how the hell _did_ he find one of those things?) is more unbelievable than listening to that crackling voice in his ear. It’s more unbelievable than putting his head down and breaking about every speed limit that exists to get here, thinking _no_ and _yes_ and _this is what it’s like to hope_.

It really, really hurts to hope.

“Cas, is that really you?” Dean asks.

Because the possibilities are so fucked up, and they’re so fucking endless.

They don’t get wins like this. Dean knows it. They get monsters, not miracles.

But Cas’s almost-invisible ‘yeah, it’s weird’ little dip of his chin is a more believable answer than any kind of justification would’ve been.

“No. Y-you… you’re dead,” Sam says, and Dean wants to turn around and punch his brother in the teeth for saying it aloud. Even though it’s the truth. They’re the goddamned Winchesters, their worst truths are the ones they don’t talk about it, doesn’t Sam know this by now?

“Yeah, I—I was,” Cas agrees, rocking into motion, and this is where the shoe drops and breaks them. Dean knows it. But Cas is coming closer, and Dean’s whole body is just aching and _aching_ to meet him halfway. But Dean’s never met anyone halfway. “But then I… annoyed an ancient cosmic being so much that he sent me back.”

And Cas smirks a little. The asshole fucking _smirks_.

Jesus fucking Christ.

Well, if anyone _would_ succeed in annoying a god or goddess or God or whatever so much it voted him off the island, it _would_ be Cas, wouldn’t it?

But Cas is still just looking at the two of them, that little bit of smugness fading out of his face, now. His hands twitch upwards, the motion barely disguised by the sleeves of the big ugly trench coat, and then fall back down to his side. Cas _should_ get it—better than anyone, he should understand, but maybe they should get it, too.

They don’t always get back the things that they lose. Hell, Dean’s pretty sure that with all they’ve done, a lot of the time they don’t deserve to get them back. But they don’t deserve to lose all that they have, either.

“I don’t even know what to say,” Sam says, his face so damned flat, and what the fuck is wrong with him?

“I do,” Dean says, because he does. He _does_.

He closes the distance and watches the very beginning of a ‘hello, Dean,’ appear around the corners of Cas’s mouth. It’s a smile. It’s the kind of smile that Dean knows Cas only aims at him, and that, maybe, only Dean would recognize, ‘cause his angel’s a stoic little jerk sometimes.

“Welcome home, pal,” he murmurs.

Cas’s arm is already coming up to enclose him by the time Dean’s got his around Cas’s shoulders, his cheek against Cas’s, closer than Dean allows himself when someone isn’t about to die.

Dean’s best friend, his goddamned _angel,_ doesn’t smell like blood and smoke, like burning rayon and flesh and gasoline. He smells like cut grass and like sunshine, in the middle of this dank little alley in Nowheresville, Nowhere. His cheek is smoother than Dean remembers, and his face is warm.

Cas feels so damned _good_ against him, pulled up a little on his tiptoes and leaning because Dean doesn’t know where the fuck Cas learned how to hug, but he puts his whole body into it, one hand gripping Dean’s shoulder blade. Cas turns his face in so they’re pressed together, stem to stern, and Dean has to bite down on all the things he’s never said, his mouth bloody with them. He doesn’t want to let go.

And then he lets go.

Dean has to turn his face away and let go a little too quickly, because if he doesn’t, he won’t _ever_ let go.

From about two inches away, Cas looks at him. He just looks at him with that infinite sad, blue gaze. He’s not smiling anymore, but there’s a question there.

It’s a question that Cas has been asking for years, even if the words have never passed his lips.

Dean thinks he has an answer for Cas, now. Yeah, he does.

Dean could lean back in. Step back in so they’re chest to chest again (and Christ, Cas is solid under that suit and tie). Dean could say it. Hell. He doesn’t even _have_ to say it, does he? He’s wanted to know what those lips feel like against his so fucking vividly he _dreams_ about it, and those are the dreams he wants to tell that little kid Kerri that he’s scared of. It’s fucking scary to want anything _so much_.

But Dean steps back. He steps away. He lets Sam slip into that warmth, into the hug that Dean wants to reclaim so fucking badly. Cas watches him over Sam’s shoulder for just an instant, and the corner of his mouth curves, sadly.

 _Okay,_ Cas says, silently, the way he always does when the question comes up. _Okay._

Cas isn’t not looking at Dean anymore when he turns to Sam, and it’s like the sky got torn away from overhead. But Cas is still standing there, and he’s real and he’s warm.

Cas fucking _died_. Dean kneeled at his side and watched his wings turn into dirt. He wrapped him in curtains. He mourned. He _grieved_.

He doesn’t have to anymore. And Cas deserves better than Dean’s eternal silence, than the way Dean can’t look away, than the way Dean _wants_.

But Dean opens his mouth, and nothing comes out.

Cas watches him for just one quiet heartbeat more before he lets it all fall apart again. Before that familiar gaze releases Dean, and Dean can breathe again. He’s never sure if he wants to breathe again, when it happens. There’s blood on his teeth from how hard he bit the inside of his cheek, and he licks it away.

“How long was I gone?” Cas asks, instead of the question that might tear Dean apart or might make him stronger than he’s ever been in his life.

“Too damned long,” Dean answers. His voice cracks.

Of course it’s not enough, even though it’s real. Even if that’s the truth.

Dean doesn’t know when Cas is gonna stop asking the question. Dean doesn’t know what the fuck he’s gonna do if Cas ever does. He trusts that he won’t—he has to trust that Cas won’t ever stop, that he won’t give up, that Cas is a fucking angel with a millennia of patience. Because Dean doesn’t know when he’s going to be able to answer it.

He thought it might be now. He really thought it could be now.

But it wasn’t.

Cas _died_ in front of him _,_ and even looking at a serious-faced miracle in a big beige trench coat, the angel that Dean’s been in love with for what feels like most of his goddamned existence at this point… Dean still can’t say any of the things that he knows he should have said years ago.

Yeah.

Cas’s gaze drops, and that’s that, all over again.

Not a lot scares Dean Winchester. Not anymore. He’s not afraid of monsters, they’re afraid of _him._ He’s met God, and he’s kind of a weedy, needy little fuck. He’s not afraid of dying. He’s not afraid of _Death_. Hell, she’s kind of a badass girl, when she’s not trying to off Dean and his loved ones.

Sam keeps talking, as they fall back into the things they know, the familiar patterns of a decade. The Empty, the darkness, Cas roaming through the nothing. The voice that brought Cas back.

Yeah.

Dean’s not scared of much in this world.

But he knows he’s a coward, all the same.

~fin~

**Author's Note:**

> TW: Just like in canon S13, Dean is sort of functioning day to day after Cas's death, the loss of Mary, Jack coming into their lives, but he's not in a good place mentally; he's on the edge of a suicidal depression, and he knows it. This also ends bittersweet, and I'm so sorry!
> 
> (I promise tomorrow's contribution will be happier!)


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